Great Chinese Famine
period of widespread famine in the People's Republic of China between the years 1959 and 1961 during the Great Leap Forward
The Great Chinese Famine (Chinese: 三年大饥荒; lit. 'three years of great famine') was a famine that occurred between 1959 and 1961 in the People's Republic of China (PRC). Some scholars have also included the years 1958 or 1962. It is widely regarded as the deadliest famine and one of the greatest man-made disasters in human history, with an estimated death toll due to starvation that ranges in the tens of millions (15 to 46 million), with newer estimates concentrated around 30 to 46 million excess famine deaths. The most stricken provinces were Anhui (18% dead), Chongqing (15%), Sichuan (13%), Guizhou (11%) and Hunan (8%).
The major contributing factors in the famine were the policies of the Great Leap Forward (1958 to 1962) and people's communes, launched by Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party Mao Zedong, including inefficient food distribution within the nation's planned economy; the state's extremely high grain confiscation rates for foreign exports; the use of poor agricultural techniques and poor irrigation projects; the Eliminate Sparrows Campaign which significantly disrupted the Chinese ecosystem; over-reporting of food production and political suppression from the CCP; and the rapid transition of millions of farmers to industrial labor, iron production, and steel production.
During the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference in early 1962, Liu Shaoqi, then President of China, formally attributed 30% of the famine to natural disasters and 70% to man-made errors (三分天灾，七分人祸). After the launch of Reform and opening up, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officially stated in June 1981 that the famine was mainly due to the mistakes of the Great Leap Forward as well as the Anti-Right Deviation Struggle, in addition to some natural disasters and the Sino-Soviet split.
Terminology
Aside from the "Three Years of Great Famine" (三年大饥荒), there are two names for the famine that have been used by the Chinese government. Initially, the usual name was "Three Years of Natural Disasters" (三年自然灾害).
The public source identifies “Great Chinese Famine” as period of widespread famine in the People's Republic of China between the years 1959 and 1961 during the Great Leap Forward. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Great, Chinese and Famine.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2454958. The Library of Congress control number is sh2019000427. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1959, 1961, 1958 and 1962.
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This entry incorporates text from “Great Chinese Famine” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.